"Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver" Flashing

[HOOK]

I abandoned the Universal Audio x6 interface because of an inordinate number of blue screens when switching sampling rates and buffers.  It was brutal.  I moved on to a Lynx Aurora (n).  I have that installed on Thunderbolt and it's working great until I open Cakewalk to try to set it up.

When I open Cakewalk I'm getting a box that pops up and says "Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver".  It pops up and disappears over and over...almost so fast I can't see it, and I can't get past that to setup.  

Lil help?  What does this indicate?  Never seen this one before.

[scook]

Some DAWs install generic ASIO drivers, CbB is not one of them.

These generic drivers can interfere with manufacturer supplied ASIO drivers.

Make sure there is at most one manufacturer supplied driver for each audio interface and no generic drivers are referenced in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ASIO

 

[HOOK]

Thank you.  I'm seeing the Generic and Realtek Asio driver folders.  You're saying delete these?

[scook]

The "Generic Low Latency Driver" is an optional driver installed by Cubase. It should not be installed when audio interfaces come with an ASIO driver. Removal is recommended. Removing the registry entry effectively hides the driver from CbB.

The RealTek ASIO driver is not suitable for DAW use. It is not a generic driver and should be a problem unless you try to use ASIO driver mode with the RealTek chip. It does not matter if this is left in the registry or not just remember to use WASAPI driver modes when using the RealTek chips.

[HOOK]

Yes...that did it.  Thank you.

I actually installed a Cubase demo last week to see if I still got blue screens outside of Cakewalk.  I did.

Excellent diagnosis, sir.  Thank you.

[Noel Borthwick]

This is why we advise never installing or using these drivers. What they do is hook into Windows and utilize the audio device via low level WDM.
Since at startup time Cakewalk loads all drivers to check for availability, when we hit this driver, it causes symtoms like you saw even if you never intended to use it. Sometimes it will even change the sample rate of your audio interface as a result of being loaded.
The best solution is to remove these ASIO wrapper drivers from your system so Cakewalk never sees them.

One thing I've been wanting to do is to change how Cakewalk starts up to avoid loading all ASIO drivers once one has been selected by the user. This might help alleviate problems like this. Its a pretty big change so will have to wait for when I have time to tackle that.

[murat k.]

12 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

This is why we advise never installing or using these drivers. What they do is hook into Windows and utilize the audio device via low level WDM.
Since at startup time Cakewalk loads all drivers to check for availability, when we hit this driver, it causes symtoms like you saw even if you never intended to use it. Sometimes it will even change the sample rate of your audio interface as a result of being loaded.
The best solution is to remove these ASIO wrapper drivers from your system so Cakewalk never sees them.

One thing I've been wanting to do is to change how Cakewalk starts up to avoid loading all ASIO drivers once one has been selected by the user. This might help alleviate problems like this. Its a pretty big change so will have to wait for when I have time to tackle that.

But we can say "Except FL Studio ASIO driver"
FL Studio ASIO driver is different from the other ASIO Drivers because it's not a WDM wrapper. It's a WASAPI wrapper. 
And with the new Cakewalk release 2022.11, performs better with the performance improvement in WASAPI mode by selecting the preference "Enable MMCSS for ASIO Driver"
We can call it "Low Latency WASAPI Shared Mode". Image-Line did the job which Microsoft was supposed to do with this ASIO driver.

Edited November 30, 2022 by murat k.

[Noel Borthwick]

Well even if they are doing WASAPI they are likely using WASAPI Exclusive mode rather than WASAPI shared. WASAPI shared mode cannot go lower than 10 msec for any USB devices so there isn't anything they could do to enable that. It's at the OS level.

We don't flag the FL studio driver. You can check the current list of flagged drivers in %appdata%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\drivercompat.json

[murat k.]

13 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Well even if they are doing WASAPI they are likely using WASAPI Exclusive mode rather than WASAPI shared. WASAPI shared mode cannot go lower than 10 msec for any USB devices so there isn't anything they could do to enable that. It's at the OS level.

I already know that. This is why I said:

8 hours ago, murat k. said:

Image-Line did the job which Microsoft was supposed to do with this ASIO driver.

It works like WASAPI Shared Driver. But at the same time it gives low latency. And why

15 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

We don't flag the FL studio driver

I had no issues with this driver even once. You can flag it and give no warning to the users when they select and use this driver.

[Noel Borthwick]

You said it's a WASAPI wrapper.
If it is doing low latency AND sharing, then it's not using WASAPI shared they are using something other than WASAPI.
 

[PE Musik]

Thank you for posting a resolution to this one. I was ripping my PC apart trying to figure out way it was freaking out and flipping between sample rates and flashing alert boxes so fast that I could not read them.

It was the fact that I had just updated CUBASE and it installed that ASIO driver.

Removed it and all is well! WHEW!